


Situational Failure (The Chicken Soup Remix)

by StripySock



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Frottage, Hurt Castiel, Hurt Sam Winchester, M/M, Remix, Season/Series 10, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-29
Updated: 2015-06-29
Packaged: 2018-04-05 13:48:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4182141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StripySock/pseuds/StripySock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i> There is a fear in Cas that if he lets Sam make himself at home in all of the places that Dean had declined to fill, he will lose the ability to ever refuse it again.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>Or: Sam is sick, Cas is failing, and Dean is nowhere to be found.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Situational Failure (The Chicken Soup Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mako_lies (wingeddserpent)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wingeddserpent/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Blankets](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2485340) by [mako_lies (wingeddserpent)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wingeddserpent/pseuds/mako_lies). 



> With many thanks to MissM and firesign10 for their beta work. Any mistakes that remain are my own. 
> 
> Thanks also to mako_lies for the chance to remix your fic!

Underneath the debris of the books tossed aside in the library, there's a box. Inside there are meticulously folded, well preserved narrow linen bandages, and several sealed bottles of what Sam has informed him are respectively iodine, ether and several semi-arcane solutions of dubious provenance. Cas had found it tucked between Dee's _Meditations on Angels_  and a biography of Roger Bacon, the dark wood mistakable at a glance for spoiled leather.

The remedies Sam has been applying with assiduous care to them both are not making an impact. Cas has endured ingesting more soup than he cares to think about, swallows a spoonful of each mess down only because Sam usually can't, as though in doing so Cas enacts a visiting ritual of mutual cure. There is no sympathetic resonance between them, though, they do not vibrate at the same frequency. The food that sits heavy and uneasy inside Cas does not provide Sam with sustenance. Still Cas consumes a little of it, scrapes the bottom of his spoon against his bowl, and watches Sam flinch at the metallic rake of sound against silence.

Cas opens the box once more, knows that Sam is safely in the bathroom, face pressed against the coolness of the glass. He has not observed it, but on several occasions in the short time he has been here, he has seen the faint marks on the mirror. With care he uses a sleeve to eradicate the marks, attempts to restore order where order cannot be. It is his one gesture, he thinks, one concession to the restoration of such normality as has ever existed near the Winchesters. Cas clears the glass, so he can do as humans do, and trace the ruin of himself in his reflection. It would help, he supposes, if he knew what he should look like. It is Jimmy Novak’s face that moves as he coughs, crumples into distressed lines, alien and foreign in the wet crease of illness; the slow degeneration of his grace, humanity clawing its way back, carving itself a home. The jungle returns once again and swallows the city.

 _It’s mine_ , he thinks, it is the skin he stands in, he will not share it with a long-gone ghost. Now that he is draining, failing, he clutches at what is left with a greedy selfishness that is more blackly human than he cares to admit. Somewhere in his peripheral vision, he sees the flicker of Sam returning, carefully pulling a battered copy of Dean’s preferred reading material across the box. Sam won’t touch the magazine, avoids with superstitious reverence the last traces of the man they have known, even as he turns over with restless fingers the paper that he left behind.

Sam clutches other things as well; mimics the practiced surety of Dean’s fingers around a bottle of whisky, folds into the unseen dent of Dean’s favourite chair. Castiel cannot tell if these echoes are intentional - unstudied, unuttered prayers - or if Sam and Dean simply re-enact the dullness of pain in exactly the same ways. It is the curse of his failing flesh, his diminished grace and dulled perception, that he no longer knows, whether he would ever have known the difference.

Sam sets one heavy foot before the other, trudges on. He has sunk himself into Cas as well, ingrained himself into Cas’s senses, written himself as deep as his brother is burnt in. It’s a Winchester specialty, it seems, that Cas cannot endure nor yet escape. He resents Sam’s unconsciousness of it: the way Sam touches him, the patient fury of the fire under Sam’s skin etching itself once more into Cas until again he folds to a Winchester pattern like a leaf dragged in typhoon’s wake. If he were not failing, if he were not powerless and empty, he would force recognition, insist once again on the due measure of awe that he should be allotted, that he has earned. This petty resentment against kindness, against fellowship, this too is part of his loss. There is a fear in Cas that if he lets Sam make himself at home in all of the places that Dean had declined to fill, he will lose the ability to ever refuse it again.

There’s an acrid smell now to Sam, and even with what Cas is, he can taste it, oily on his lips, bitter in his nose. Sadness and rage and the dark taint that’s been etched into the deepest part of Sam’s being they have all flooded to the surface of his skin and clustered there. The traces of sweat, the fear-stench of him - awoken from a sudden dream, Cas finds they’re more comforting than any impersonal soap or mundane gel.

Human or not, failing or not, Cas has no interest in and little knowledge of human conduct, of the many hundreds of arcane ways in which they self-regulate and impose regulation on others, and yet Sam invites curiosity. Cas suspects that Sam would let him touch, would let him push through the oil on his skin, taste the remnants of Dean left on Sam’s skin, sunk in deep, if only Cas would ask.  Would spread and yield to him, display before him the bleak shreds of humanity, an object lesson in endurance when hope is lost.

Sam will not offer, though, and Cas will not ask. In the mirrors of this bunker, the polished surfaces, Dean lurks. He dogs the space between Sam’s body and his shadow, hugs him close, raises the bottle with him, a sullen distorted figment, and Cas feels a sense of loss not merely for Dean, but for what Dean has forsaken, has given up.  Cas stands up and leans over Sam’s shoulder, breathes deep, lungfuls of spoiled sour air, human and Winchester and alive. Sam offers him a shot of whisky with a shrug, as though some part of him seeks to emulate what Cas would expect from Dean.

Cas drinks, tastes the faint trace of Sam’s skin on the mouth of the bottle, where his bottom lip has rested; drinks it down, igniting a slow, dull burn in his stomach. “Soup,” he says, and “you should rest.” He would like to sit with Sam, would like to cover himself in that too-familiar smell, loop them together. On some base animal level that he has never known, he has to feel that Sam recognizes him, that Cas is part of him. He is tempted to run his hand through Sam’s hair and borrow some of his essential essence. Sam has not a drop to spare, though, and Cas resists.

“Soup,” he says again, softer, and Sam makes no sign of hearing but drinks again, takes Cas into himself, an unknown sharing.

Dean’s face is reflected in the polished saucepot in the kitchen, reaching for a carving knife, face set and solemn in the beautiful mode of the best kind of torturer, and Cas drops the pan in shock, in recognition. Feels the burn of soup, reheated again and again splash against his skin, and Sam is there. He's always there, cool and resourceful. He takes a cloth and kneels at Cas's feet. Squats awkwardly, ridiculously, to scoop up the pot and set it back on the stove, movement sure despite the pain scrawled in the tight corner of his mouth.

 _I could destroy you_ , Cas thinks, without a second's doubt or any wish to do so. He knows the tender vulnerable places of Sam's soul, recollects the unbending line of Sam's neck, his jaw, the taut curve of his body as he expelled the angel had crawled in without permission or leave. For a second he feels the violent, ungovernable urge to do so, a surge of feeling that leaves him weak in Sam's grasp, struck for the first time with fear.

He just wants, he thinks, he just wants Sam to touch him without the expectation of weakness, without the expectation of failure.

"Take me inside," he says instead, slurred and old and sore, and Sam half carries him in, warm, human and utterly alien. Cas thinks at first that Sam cannot know what that admission does to Cas, and then he thinks of Sam stretched out under the needle, the sweat-thickness of his hair, the blazing determination of his soul as he let Cas help, and he wonders.

Cas is left alone, surrounded by the thick heaviness of Sam’s scent, the human despair of the animal-like nest he’s built for himself. He drapes one of the blankets over his shoulders and gropes amongst the books that Sam has left, fits his hand once more to Sam’s bottle, smoothes his lip along where Sam’s has touched. It clears the taste of soup from his mouth. Tucks the curve of it into his arm, remembers the glass phials filled with old men’s fear of death.

He’s not precisely asleep when Sam returns - he’s in a state of half-remembered dreams, and when he moves his mouth it’s wet as though he’s lost control of himself a little bit more. He can hear the hesitant, soft shuffle of Sam’s feet, the way he walks - unsure, lacking the purpose that manifests only now in his obsessive search for Dean. Feels Sam stand there and look at him, mimics the sleep that doubtless Sam expects, and curls his feet closer, leaving room for Sam to slump down at the end of the sofa.

When Sam attempts to ease the bottle from his grasp, though, Cas props open his eyes in simulated reproof. Chastened, Sam takes his hand back, amenable as always in all the small things while immovable in the large, as frustrating and idiosyncratic as his brother. Cas wonders again at a perverse God who has set the Winchesters on Earth as proof, it seems, of human folly. Driven by an impulse that he can’t name, Cas pushes his fingers between the clammy skin of Sam’s neck and the fabric of his shirt, hooks them around unyielding cloth and tugs with a ferocity that he can no longer measure. Sam jerks forward, catches himself, a spasm of pain across his face, and Cas feels the sting of it, but can offer no consolation, no relief.

He makes himself move, shift, yield space to the weight of Sam, gives him inches in which to rest, an impossibly narrow offering that Sam does not take, poised as he is on flight, on the edge of fear. Sam’s reactions are dulled by sodden, heavy drinking, and too many books that blur his eyes and thoughts and knowledge of how touch like this ends, an outcome that seems clear even in Cas’s admittedly limited experience. He’s breathing fast. Cas thinks if he pressed a hand closer, through the dull flannel shirt, that Sam’s heart would pronounce the pitter-pat of swallowed fear. If he leaned his ear in and listened deeper, he thinks perhaps under that, there would be the vaguest trace of want.

Fingers press into Cas’s shoulder, forgotten pressure of phantom touch. Cas set his touch on Dean once in the same way, wiped away as if it had never been, but the marks that Dean has left on him are deeper, clearer, and they’re mirrored in Sam. It’s a small step to tug Sam even closer, to share the warm air, denuded of oxygen, that Sam breathes out in short, shallow gasps, tainted by whisky, to feel the damp puff on his lip, tension stretched between them. An even smaller step to touch their mouths together.

He wonders what Sam is thinking, behind the glaze of drink, the dullness of too many long nights, too many terrible deeds planned and dreamed, the aching loss of Dean - the amputation of a limb that Sam no longer knows how to live without. If Sam even thinks at all, isn’t just reacting to the touch extended, the diminution of their loneliness offered.

The thought changes nothing. Not the way that Sam kisses him, subdued, then eager, the hard press of his lip, the feel of his body surging forward until Cas sinks back, opens without giving, fingers digging into the vulnerable skin of Sam’s back. Cas feels the fragile bones underneath the flesh, the universal proof of unwillingly shared humanity. He heals Sam a little then, exerts the force of his will and decaying grace on Sam’s body, feeling the flinch, the sudden anger in Sam’s body at the intrusion. Sinks his teeth into Sam’s bottom lip and tugs, reminds him with the ache that he has taken Sam’s pain before. It’s healing, not absolution.

Sam gasps, the sway of his shoulders softer now, the tension of pain relieved for the moment at least, but there’s no forgiveness in the line of his mouth, only a tacit endurance. His arm is still tucked in tender against his body, and Cas feels a slow insistent want sit heavy in his gut. He pulls Sam down even further, until they’re hip to hip, and they grind together - awkward, messy, without grace or rhythm, the same frantic desperation driving them as it always does. Sam’s breathing in deep, a heavy blanket of body that stifles Cas and comforts him at the same time, jerky drive of his hips unsure, and he tastes of cheap whisky, almost sweet, honey in the lion.

There’s a thousand years of hard-won experience that backs the assertion that this is foolish, that this is the unfortunate bequest of humanity - the need to touch, the need to taste, as though without evidence of the senses, there can be nothing else. He has seen the way the Winchesters embrace, seen the desperate clutch of uncertain emotion as though they expect every word to be understood in the imperfect record of occasional touch. This is human, he tells himself, and yet cannot bring himself to care.

It’s Sam who stops, Sam who pulls back and wipes a hand across his mouth, eyes startled and wide as though he had never considered this, and Cas thinks it’s even possible that he might never have thought of it before. He has lost the ability to judge where his peculiarities end and humanities begin.

There’s silence, a chasm opening up between them, Sam’s mouth forming unspoken words of explanation, apology perhaps, for wanting this, for taking it. Dean sits there, between them still, a heavy presence of absence, a reproof for thinking of anything else, and Cas knows that if past form holds, Sam could grow to resent the theft of even these minutes from tracking Dean, as he resents the whisky and himself for their continued failure to yield results.

He'll have to go; away from the temptation to fill the empty places of himself, to offer poor consolation, to change and weaken someplace else. A very little later, perhaps a very little after Sam has showered himself of what scent Cas has left on him, sobered enough to turn again in an ouroboros move of self-examination, enough to begin asking questions for which Cas has no answer. For now, he breathes in deep and takes the last few moments of what he can have, thinks of glass vials and bandages that can do nothing to fix their wounds.


End file.
